The symptoms of my computer crashing was very similar to those reported in the comments section of a particular bug in an application that I download and get updates via a ppa.

Recently, the ppa's bug page showed that the bug has been fixed-released, but very little information was given about the fix.
How can I find out exactly -

What did they actually do to fix the bug

When was it released

How can I be 100% sure that I have received the update (for example, is there an update history in Ubuntu that will tell me that this particular update was downloaded and installed, with a reference to that particular bug?)

1 Answer
1

You can verify most of this through the changelog for the particular package. Each changelog is kept in

/usr/share/doc/<packagename>/changelog.Debian.gz

For example, you can view the changelog for firefox:

zless /usr/share/doc/firefox/changelog.Debian.gz

For Ubuntu-provided packages, each changelog entry should have the version number, the date it was released, and a list of bugs fixed but that particular version. If you're lucky, you may get a description of the fix too. Hopefully the owner of your PPA is providing this information as well, but that's not always guaranteed. If not, your only option might be to ask the PPA maintainer.

You can check which version of a package you are running by using dpkg:

dpkg -l <packagename>

If you want to get into the fine details, you can download the source for the package with: